A Study On The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Listening Anxiety And Listening Scores

Listening,as the most important aspect of the four language skills,has assumed a central role in language learning.Through my internship in a high school,I found that high school students in English class and English test suffered from varying degrees of anxiety.In recent years,there are many related researches about listening anxiety and learning strategies,listening anxiety and learning motivation,listening anxiety and academic achievement at home and abroad.Most of the research subjects are college students and middle school students.Studies on the correlations between listening anxiety and test scores of senior high school students are relatively rare.This thesis aims to answer the following questions: firstly,to acquire detailed knowledge of high school students’ listening anxiety;secondly,to analyze and compare different types of high school students on English listening anxiety to find out whether there are significant differences among them;lastly,to explore the relevance between English listening anxiety and test scores of senior high school students.It is hoped it will provide enlightens on teachers’ teaching and students’ learning.The objects chosen for the study are senior two students from one of the key high schools in Zhangzhou.The instruments of the study include English Listening Anxiety Scale,the midterm test and the interview.All the data are processed with the help of SPSS21.0.Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are taken in the paper.Reliability and validity coefficient test,descriptive statistics,independent sample T test,Pearson correlation analysis and other statistical methods are performed respectively on the target samples.The results show that high school students’ English listening anxiety is at the middle level.The level of anxiety among the four dimensions of English listening anxiety from high to low in turn are listening situations,listening material characteristics,self-evaluation and listening habits.Boys’ English listening anxiety is higher than girls’.Tibetan students start to learn English rather late,and their language,Tibetan is totally different from English.So it is found they have poor listening performance and their listening anxiety is higher than that of the Han ethnic students’.There are significant differences between the Tibetan students and the Han ethnic students.The students who are taught by foreigner teacher and Chinese teacher have lower English listening anxiety level than that of the traditional teaching students.Because the former students have more access to English.There are also significant differences between them.Besides,the anxiety of the students in the experimental class who study in the severe competitive environment is higher than the ordinary class students’,but the two groups do not have the significant differences.In the comparison between liberal arts and science students,there are significant differences between them.Moreover,by the means of correlation analysis,English listening anxiety has significantly negative influence on English listening performance.And self-evaluation is significantly negatively correlated with listening achievement in four dimensions,while listening habits,listening material characteristics,listening situation just have lower negative correlations with listening scores.Among ordinary students’ three dimensions of anxiety,self evaluation,listening material characteristics,listening habits have multiple linear regression relationship with English listening performance.At the end of the thesis,some suggestions are offered to reduce English listening anxiety.First of all,teachers and students should focus on the basics of vocabularies and phonetics.Then,teachers should select the appropriate listening materials,enhance the listening training and teach students more listening skills.Besides,teachers should be good at creating a more relaxing teaching atmosphere to alleviate students’ anxiety symptoms and improve their interests in English learning.What’s more,teachers should try to cultivate students’ cross-cultural and interdisciplinary awareness,and guide students to learn the cultural knowledge of Anglo-American countries.In the class,teachers can encourage students to combine English with other subjects,and make the teaching process truly entertaining.Finally,parents and teachers should pay all-round attention to the psychological development of students,so that students can have a healthy mentality.